


with gentle manners

by xiuzhe



Category: Fate/Grand Order
Genre: F/F, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-23 18:49:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18707875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xiuzhe/pseuds/xiuzhe
Summary: All of Nobunaga's ends have come in fire. For Okita, she goes willingly to the torch.





	with gentle manners

**Author's Note:**

> For a friend.

Honnō-ji burns around her once again, so brightly and so terribly that the temple looks built from gold, with the sun itself rising behind it. Nobunaga knows she cannot feel it, but her eyes water from the heat and the smell of her melting skin catches in her nostrils; her memories nothing more than the steel bloom folded again and again into the blade of her body.

Winning here has felt too much like losing, but she is grateful for the taste of her hubris in her mouth, fed back to her by this splinter of a reality built on her mistake, and glad for throb in her skull where Okita’s stern hand had swiftly smacked her back in check. Nobunaga can see herself dispersing, crumbling alongside Okita, the both of them being drawn backwards in time and reality to freefall. 

Something about it strikes her as almost sad, this interlude where nothing has mattered, but all she wants to do is smile. She allows the joy of it to spill over, and her last act is a grin so wide her lips shake around it, the corners of her eyes crinkling as they slide shut.

* * *

Nobunaga wakes to the press of cold tile against her back, sterile light blaring through her shuttered eyelids. She swallows to wet her dry mouth, tongues at the backs of her teeth, and grimaces at the touch of a hand to her bicep, mouth crimping when the fingers curl into her jacket.

 _Ranmaru_ , she begins to think, with an old and fond irritation, then stops, the wrongness of it scraping up her spine. This is not right, she knows at once; too bright to be Fuyuki, too dark to be Honnō-ji.

Nobunaga turns her head towards the touch, and cracks open an eye. Beneath the swoop of her eyelashes, she can make out the bleary shape of a pale arm, tapering off beneath a draping sleeve. She opens her other eye and blinks rapidly, bringing her vision into focus just in time to see Okita’s cheeks stain pink with unguarded surprise, her mouth lax.

“Erm,” Okita says. 

Nobunaga huffs through her nose. “I sounded so cool as we were leaving,” she says. Okita’s hand remains on her arm, warm and forgotten. “How embarrassing.”

“I’m very sorry.” Okita clears her throat. The bridge of her nose crinkles as she swallows. “I think this is my fault, this time.”

Nobunaga tips her chin back, drawing her gaze to the ceiling. She exhales, focus narrowing down for a breath of a moment to the sink of her chest and the cup of Okita’s palm. It’s a temptation to allow time to draw out and wear thin, but it is one that she resists.

“It really can’t be helped,” she says, rolling up to sit. Okita’s hand jerks away, moving to burrow into the lap of her hakama in a way that fails to be anything but considered feigning for casual. Nobunaga dismisses it from her notice. “Let’s go, then.”

* * *

In the end, the two of them venture after Okita’s evil heart alone. It’s barely a spark against the vast emptiness of the universe, a struck match in a windstorm. Destined and bound to be snuffed out.

There are better and bolder adventures to be had, but she knows the grave furrow in Okita’s brow will not relent until the deed has been done. If nothing else, that is reason enough to go and expedite the inevitable.

They trail their quarry steadily through the streets of an Edo that is both foreign and familiar to Nobunaga; a rendition from the future paying homage to the past. Nothing contests their forward march through the streets. The waiting makes her skin prickle and her limbs thrum, but she is not blind to how Okita’s body unravels from the exertion of every step, until she’s worn down to the quick and shaking enough to come undone.

“Rest, already,” Nobunaga interjects at last, when she can stand no more of the sight of it, and plops herself down on a nearby engawa when Okita begins to protest.

It is a terse moment before Okita joins her, her wet, clotted swallow and the rough bob of her throat echoing in Nobunaga’s ears, the knobs of their knees knocking together.

“We have to keep moving,” Okita mumbles, and Nobunaga is thankful, at least, that the woman has the sense to sound shamed even when she’s being obstinate.

Nobunaga flings her hand out in answer, gesturing around them. She wills Okita to hear what she isn’t saying. There is nothing for them to fight-- there is nothing for them to see but wood and dust, the town barren even of the ghosts of anyone who might have once inhabited it. Nothing is lived in, nothing is touched. She has peered into window after window as they’ve passed and watched the smudge of her hand slip from the glass quicker than she can blink, has glanced back over her shoulder to see their joined footprints swept over the moment their shoes lift.

Okita’s tongue clicks against the roof of her mouth. Nobunaga closes her eyes, letting her hand smooth, blind, down her belly until her palm meets the twinge in her side, the pressure a panacea to the throb. The wound is long gone, but the ache yet follows.

Could this be her fault, after all? The grail had been her grasp, her vision actualising, then she’d-- fallen, hadn’t she? Over herself, clumsy and karmic, or--

\--to her knees, blood soaking her gloves, spilling over her fingers in a rush, like a stream churning after the rains--

“What were you going to wish for?” Nobunaga asks.

Okita stiffens beside her, and Nobunaga cocks her head towards her, making it a point to keenly observe the way she winds her shoulders back and straightens her spine.

“Come on,” Nobunaga pries, when her only answer is Okita’s silence, yawning out between them. “You must have had one wish.” Nobunaga was as certain of it as she was certain she could pick Okita’s voice out from beneath matchlock fire, as certain she could see and know her face from across a battlefield. Okita wants, and Nobunaga waits. It’s who the each of them are.

“To fight,” Okita says at last. Her voice cracks. “To keep fighting.”

Her whisper cuts through Nobunaga as if she’d screamed it. “What,” she says, and then she laughs, the sound gurgling out of her. Okita’s bared herself to her in a way that’s wholly new and raw, and she’s helpless to stop her own reaction to it. “What a silly wish! What or who would even be left to fight, once you won the grail?”

Not an inch of Okita is assuaged. “If I had only just--” she starts, only to flinch, the motion violent, as she realises just what she is saying. Nobunaga doesn’t need her to finish. Nobunaga knows just how quietly Okita had gone, in that hospital room at the turn of the season. How her life had slid out from beneath her when she had no more strength to sap, while the world changed over, leaving her stranded on the shore while it swept the rest of what she knew and loved out to sea.

A gentle end that only Okita could find the guilt in.

“Fighting is a tool, not a goal,” Nobunaga says. She holds up her hand to stop the retort Okita’s mouth parts around. _Taking up your sword again won’t put your Kondo’s head back on his shoulders_ sits on the flat of her tongue, but it is too much to say aloud. “You know that. I know you do.”

“Nobu--” Okita grits out. Her knuckles are as white as snow, bloodless from the trembling fists of her hands. “Don’t you feel-- unfinished?”

Okita’s passion batters the very air from her lungs so suddenly that all Nobunaga can do is stare back at her. _Ah_ , she thinks, eventually, and laughs again, feeling all the more helpless than she had when Okita had wrung the reaction from her the first time. Again, her mind spirals back to Honnō-ji, and when she closes her eyes to blink she swears she can feel her stomach falling out of itself again, the sluggish weep of blood from where the arrow that had finally pushed her back had been pulled free. She can see the glint of her kaishakunin’s blade in the firelight, and how pitifully Ranmaru’s hands tremble around the hilt.

“I made the rice cake,” she answers simply.

It is enough to pay Okita’s passion forward, stunning the woman into her own breathlessness, her tear-fringed eyes blowing wide. “What?!” she blurts, shrill, flinching the moment the burst of sound is jolted out of her. 

The coil of tension between them unravels by an inch, making room for Nobunaga’s mouth to split in a toothy grin.

“You’re really just--” Okita splutters and stalls. Nobunaga watches her hands flail after her tongue before she concedes with a defeated groan.

“Foolish,” Nobunaga finishes for her.

“No.” Okita’s voice is soft, a stark contrast to the sharp rebuke of her shaking head. “I-- envy you, how you can be so careless--”

Her lips crimp into a grimace, but Nobunaga intercepts the apology she knows is racing to follow, hand clasping the jut of Okita’s shoulder. Okita startles under the touch, and Nobunaga circles her thumb gently, unthinking, until she feels the flare of Okita’s nerves simmer.

“It’s not carelessness, you know.” Nobunaga gives her a pat before she pulls away, putting from her mind how Okita sways in chase. “It’s practicality.”

* * *

Nobunaga is simple by make as much as by nature.

A shallow pool better reflects whoever might peer into it, after all. Okita is but one of many who have tried to peer into her and sift through her depths. All have come away from the pursuit the same: wanting and dangerously unaware of what Nobunaga has seen within them in return.

Most had assumed she was proud. Okita had assumed she was penitent. She was both, but not so much that either could be weaponised against her. She had guarded herself from that young, had taken it to her grave, and had pulled it back out of the dirt with the rest of her after. Memories flickered and fleeted, but the lessons she had bound herself to, bone-deep, remained.

If one were to see her deeds in life as requiring retribution, had she not, then, been punished by death? By how history remembered her, always the first line in the poem, the daimyō whose ambitions blazed so arrogantly that the flames she set upon Mount Hiei and Nagashima returned to consume her?

This is what she wants to tell Okita, most of all, as she watches the line of her back, leading through the wind of the streets: if nothing else, you need only sit at the table and be judged once. No price remains to pay with the soul once the body is gone.

Okita has become her desire for repentance so severely that it delivers her to the precipice of death, again and again. It is a living torment, unearned and undeserved. Nobunaga yearns, with a frightening desperation, to allay it. She fears the devastation her desires could wreak.

Okita is beautiful, and burdened. Nobunaga has wanted women for less, and seen them go up in smoke for it, bodies tinder to her pyre. In lack of Nobunaga’s interference, Okita, at least, remains whole.

* * *

Nobunaga looks on as Okita towers over herself, the fragment that has stolen her face and has come to nest in the replication of her final moments. She looks on as Okita’s fingers loosen around her hilt, as her body begins to quiver like a reed thrashed by the wind.

The Okita beneath her is all but dead; her face white, her lips blue, her chest still, stiller than the blade pressed to her throat.

“What are you waiting for?” Nobunaga asks, and Okita judders, full-body.

“I,” she starts. Stops. Nobunaga watches her grip tighten.

“I’ll do it,” Nobunaga says. She takes a half-step forward, boot squeaking against the wood.

Okita brings her sword to bear in one swift, sweeping arc, and it is done. The steel continues to sing through the air for seconds after, ringing in Nobunaga’s ears.

One clean cut, at the moment of agony.

Okita slumps to her knees on the mattress as though her strings have been snipped, and the scuff of Nobunaga’s boot once again betrays how she lurches, primal, with the motion.

It takes long minutes for Okita return to her feet, and Nobunaga fills them with silence, not trusting her mouth. When Okita gathers herself to face her, they are already half-faded, the room disintegrating beneath their feet. Okita’s expression is schooled into a passivity that doesn’t reach her eyes, and as her lips pull into a quaking smile, Nobunaga is damned.

Her fingers snare Okita by the wrist, thumb kneading her pulsepoint, and she thinks, as Okita’s surprise washes over her, with a serene certainty, _I will die for you again_.

* * *

Nobunaga wakes to tile against her back and Okita’s fingers wound in hers.

“Here again, huh?” Nobunaga remarks, cracking open an eye. Okita swims into view, haloed by Chaldea’s blinding fluorescents. 

“It seems so...” The fingers in Nobunaga’s grip flex, but find no give, and accede without a meaningful struggle.

“I want a room with a kotatsu,” Nobunaga says, opening her other eye. Okita blinks back at her, blanching.

“Wh--at?”

Nobunaga draws her knees up, and hoists herself up onto her ass with a grunt. “What? I am a very esteemed guest, it is the least this Master could do to accommodate me.”

She gestures with their twined hands as if it’s all rather obvious, and Okita does mount a very adamant attempt to untangle them both, at that, stammering as Nobunaga makes it to her feet and begins to charge off down the corridor.

“We can’t just intrude,” Okita insists loudly, even as she falls into Nobunaga’s stride.

“Of course we can!” Nobunaga can hear Okita’s scowl, and laughs. 

Nobunaga cannot change what is to be, and so she turns her head and marches ever-forward, the distance she has carefully crafted between them slotting back into its rightful place.

The greatest trick the devil has ever played on herself, after all, is to believe that she can spare Okita the fate of all the loves that have come before.

**Author's Note:**

> My understanding of Fate is that the lore is made up and the historical accuracy doesn't matter, so this is just a smörgåsbord of Googleable Facts mixed in with GudaGuda shenanigans.
> 
> Not pictured: the part where they live happily ever after as frenemy-wives.


End file.
